Vermont is tolerant of all sorts of things — pot, late-term abortion, and even guns are all legal. But officials in Burlington won’t stand for citizens acting as a community to protect kids from getting run over.
Five Sisters is the name of a neighborhood on the south end of Burlington, just above Callahan Park, a tree-lined oasis filled with ballfields and playgrounds. Getting to the park involves crossing Locust Street. While a few crosswalks are feeding into the north side of the park, the folks coming down Locust Terrace or Hayward Street didn’t have a crossing.
It became a more significant problem because crossing there is the straightest route for boys and girls to get down to Champlain Elementary School on Pine Street, south of the park.
The locals lobbied Burlington’s government for a crosswalk, to no avail.
After years of frustration, Five Sisters residents took matters into their own hands. Using a cardboard stencil and white paint, residents painted a crosswalk one Sunday.
This meant safer crossings on Monday, and it also finally got the attention of the Department of Public Works. The department showed up on Tuesday and removed the crosswalk.
The crosswalk had not undergone regulatory review, and the city bureaucrats said it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, presumably because it lacked a curb cutout ramp. Rather than getting to work improving the lighting and cutting out a curb ramp, the city busybodies erased the crosswalk.
Take that, schoolchildren!
